We find Facebook advertising very effective with its broad audience of 1.6 billion active users and extremely flexible targeting options. Through detailed and flex targeting options, you are able to reach almost any specific group on Facebook.

Facebook targeting is also a great way to find new niches. If you are stuck on coming up with new design ideas, you could always work backwards by looking at different Facebook targeting options. Check out what targeting options are available and try to combine at least 3 or 4 of them to create a targeted niche. There are endless targeting combinations, the key is to find niches that are passionate and engaged.

Let's now break down all seven targeting options:

1. Custom Audiences

Custom audience can be created only for those you've already had contacts with. It could be email lists, phone numbers, website traffics tracked by Facebook pixel, etc.

Custom audience lets you to create retargeting ads. Retargeting means targeting consumers based on their previous internet action. It could be introducing a new product to your social media following. It could also be retarget those who have visited your campaign page but did not make a purchase.

You are able to upload a .txt or .csv format file containing the following information to create a custom audience:

Emails

Phone numbers

Facebook user IDs

Mobile advertiser IDs

By placing your new Facebook pixel into your TeeChip account, you can create custom audiences of those who've visited your campaign page but didn't make a purchase. These customers have shown interest in your campaign by clicking into your previous ad. They may not be able to make a purchase at that time or were yet convinced to buy. It is always a good practice to display another ad specifically target to them.

To create a Custom Audience from website traffic:

Implement the new Facebook pixel in your TeeChip account

Go to Audiences in Ad Manager

Go to Website Traffic

Select "People visiting specific web pages but not others"

Input your TeeChip campaign url into "URL contains"

Input your "http://teechip.com/receipt" into the next box. This will exclude all people have already made a purchase.

One thing to note is that Facebook is only able to make a custom audience if your page has over 20 visits. Also, it takes about half to one day for Facebook to retrieve your visitors. So don't worry if you see "your audience is too small" when you first create a custom audience.

2. Locations

Facebook targeting allows you to reach people in specific locations:

One or more countries

States

Cities

Postal codes

Addresses

DMA

Congressional districts

Many of our sellers take advantage of location targeting and create regional related shirts. "I may live in Australia but my heart belongs to the USA" is a great example of location-targeted design.

Let's see what we did here:

Locations > People who LIVE in this location

Locations > Australia

Age > 25-50 (The age bracket that converts the best for some of our sellers, but always test for yourself!)

Detailed Targeting > Behaviors > Expats > Expats (US)

We were able to advertise a shirt for US citizens living abroad in Australia utilizing the location feature of Facebook targeting. There are endless combinations you could create!

3. Age

Here you are able to choose the minimum and maximum age range for your audience. Select the approximate age range for your niche.

Some of our sellers have found that age 25-50 usually convert the best. However, this varies from niche to niche. It is always good to test for yourself. Remember, you can always check performance by each age group and adjust your ad accordingly.

4. Gender

What is your your target audience's gender?

Although obvious for some cases, others could be a grey area. As we've said before, always test for yourself!

5. Language

What language does your niche speak?

This category closely relates to location targeting. You are able to target ethnic groups by choosing their native tongue.

6. Detailed Targeting

This is where most of the magic happens. Facebook has partnered with data brokers like Epsilon, Acxiom, and Datalogix to provide the most detailed targeting options for each Facebook user. Facebook might know more about you than your do from interests, purchase behaviors, to even your income. Detailed targeting gives us a great leverage to find our target niche.

Starting late 2015, Facebook introduced Flex Targeting which allows advertisers to narrow down target audience even more precisely. You are able to choose people who match multiple interests. This new feature also allows you to exclude interests as well.

Here we are able to target truck drivers who loves cats but not dogs. How cool is that? You can narrow down or add to the list as many times as you like.

Facebook identifies interests by timeline posts, keywords associated with the pages they like or apps they use, ads they've clicked on and other sources.

We are able to target basically anything here. Just type in the keywords you are looking for and Facebook would most likely have something for you.

Here are the main categories under Interests:

Business and industry

Entertainment

Family and relationships

Fitness and wellness

Food and drink

Hobbies and activities

Shopping and fashion

Sports and outdoors

Technology

There are many subcategories under each of these, but you are certainly not subjected to this list. We recommend to search for active groups or fan pages of your niche on Facebook. Audience Insights is a great tool to search for related groups or interest points to plan for your ad. After you've discovered some passionate groups for your niche, place them here and there is a good chance the groups would show up.

Like we've discussed earlier, if you are stuck researching for new designs or niches, looking through the targeting options might inspire you with a new niche that hasn't been thought of.

Behaviors:

Facebook combines activities people do on Facebook with data from third-party partners to determine behaviors.

There are many subcategories under each one of the followings. Be sure to go to Ad Manager to check out the whole list for yourself!

Automotive: What type of vehicle does your niche drive?

B2B: Are you targeting to a specific industry or company?

Charitable donations: Niche with a cause?

Consumer Classification: Affinity for mid to high value goods.

Digital activities: What type of operating system or browser does your niche most likely to use? Or perhaps a shirt for passionate fans of certain operating systems?

7. Connections

If you already have a populated fan page on Facebook for your niche, you are able to target to your niche here. However, most times our sellers would directly reach out to their page by timeline post and exclude them in ads and ad budget.

There are endless combinations of targeting options with these 7 categories. Most times, the more detailed your targeting is, the more likely your audience would respond.

One thing to keep in mind is you want to have a decent audience size after narrowing down interests. We suggest to keep your audience size at about 50,000 to 400,000. However, there isn't a magical number when it comes to audience size. Every niche is different. Just make sure that you are able to make enough sales from your audience. Testing is always key.

Targeting Research

Now that we know what is out there on Facebook Manager, let's get started to find our target niche on it.

Google and Audience Insight are your best friends when it comes to Facebook targeting research. One question to keep in mind is: What is something that ONLY my niche would know?

For example, a lot of people might be interested in health and fitness and may follow big magazine titles like Fitness Magazine. But only people who are really serious and passionate would subscribe to magazines like The Box. Many people might like Arnold Schwarzenegger but it doesn't necessarily mean they are an fitness enthusiast. Schwarzenegger is a famous celebrity to the public and we'd be targeting many who aren't passionate fitness enthusiast. In stead, non-mainstream fitness coaches like Kayla Itsines usually have a loyal and passionately following who would be more likely to purchase a fitness t-shirt.

Facebook's Audience Insights is an excellent tool to dive deeper into your niche. After you've done a bit of research about your audience, you can input them on Audience Insights and Facebook will help you find where else your niche is hanging out on Facebook. It gives you data on:

Now that you've found a list of interests your niche is passionate about, we can now input them into Audience Insights to see what else Facebook can find for us based on these.

Audience Insights is a very rich tool in finding details about our niche. It contains same categories as Ad Manager and many of our sellers utilize this as the one of the main resource for targeting research.

After you've found your target research on Facebook, it is now time to set up ads and test, test, and test! It is hard to predict which segment of the niche would respond the best. It is only through testing that we can find out. Be sure to make an ad set for each big interest point. We recommend keeping the audience size between 50,000 to 500,000.